Best PC games of 2017

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Alec: A first-person shooter with heart. And also with the sort of bug-eyed mania that means seeing even a single moment of the game out of context paints it as bellowing, hyper-violent incoherence that’s trying to say and do far too much at once. Which is a totally fair cop, but the thing about Wolf II is that, if you’re with it from the start, almost every splurge of splenetic nonsense makes sense, has connections to events and people and most of all to its star BJ’s internal monologue, which itself is equal parts impossibly true grit and glum self-doubt. BJ grounds the mania, makes it all work when, in almost any other game, it simply would not.

BJ Blazkowicz, the original FPS lunkhead, now the vanishingly rare heart and soul of the 21st century action game – whoulda thunk it?

Given the insane discounting of Wolf 2 not long after launch, my guess is it’s not sold too well, and we know what not selling too well means both for franchises and experiments. If Wolf 2 ends up being a full stop on a certain style of single player action games, it is, at least, a very fine and heartfelt one.

Adam: The New Order, MachineGames’ first trip to Wolfentown, is a better shooter than the sequel. I replayed it right before I dug into The New Colossus and two things stuck out – it’s massive, and it’s amazing at sneaking, stabbing and shooting. The first time I played, I was so astonished that it not only had a story but that it had characters that I cared about that I don’t think I noticed quite how good it was at everything else.

Wolfenstein 2 is a damn fine shooter as well, but sometimes I found myself waiting for the action to finish so I could get back to the story. The fact that I can write that sentence, sincerely, about a Wolfenstein game still seems weird. It probably always will. But that’s fine because Wolfenstein is a weird game. It’s silly, frightening, romantic, hilarious, exhilarating, wonderful and ugly. As Alec says, Blazkowicz is at the heart of it again, wounded and weary, a man burdened by his own myth. He’s a hero, but he’s sometimes a reluctant protagonist, preferring to listen and follow than to lead.

Thankfully, he has a supporting cast more than ready and able to lead. They’re the real stars here, showing the cruelty and nobility and anger and hatred and fear that are so often missing in depictions of war. Nobility gets flushed down the toilet, brothers in arms are jostled aside to make place for their sisters, and there’s a manic glee alongside the terror and pain.

I think it’ll find its place in history as one of the great singleplayer first-person shooters, and I’m fairly sure it’ll be the game I always think of when I cast my mind back to the things I played in 2017. That’s because it didn’t just capture the zeitgeist, it performed an act of extraordinary rendition on the zeitgeist, spirited it away to parts unknown, and ripped its shrieking soul out so that it could plaster it, garish and loud, onto a screen. Whether you think the game (and its marketing) performed a crude hijacking of political concerns or delivered a cathartic and triumphant smackdown (or blew a gigantic raspberry), I’d love to hear what you think.

For me, Wolfenstein 2 worked. As a story, as a (anti-)rebel yell and as a beautifully crafted game that goes to some very ugly places. I look forward to going wherever MachineGames take me next.

Prey made my GOTY, too. It’s a flawed game, nowhere particularly outstanding on its own, and yet it scratched an itch that had been bugging me for almost 20 years: It was a true successor to System Shock, a heritage that the BioShock series never lived up to (and Prey even had the great bolshy yarblockos to subtly call Irrational’s franchise out on some of its more glaring issues).

I really wish I liked Prey as much as some. Such great level design, visuals and decent narrative, along with some interesting mechanics let down by some of the least fun and most frustrating combat I’ve ever played.

Still though, Nier, Divinity Sin 2, OneShot and Night In The Woods are on here and that’s what’s important. Still need to finish up Numenera too but I wish it didn’t get lost up its own backside so much. Maybe I just need to accept it’s not going to get close to P:T.

Totally agree with you about Prey, wonderful exploration and world-building totally let down by frustrating combat against endlessly-respawning enemies. Every time I’ve tried to go back to it, I have a really fun twenty minutes or so before finding that I need to waste more precious (non-respawning) resources on killing yet another mimic that’s popped up in the same place for the tenth time. It completely kills my desire to explore this fantastically built world and it’s a real shame.

I normally agree about respawning enemies, but in Prey once I realized that it’s triggered entirely by progress in the main story (except for Nightmares, which have a predictable timer, and except for a certain end-game thing that everyone hates), it no longer put a damper on my exploration and actually encouraged me to make changes to the environment to prepare for new spawns that I knew were coming. Setting traps, posting turrets, blocking off paths, gooing ladders to sniper positions and clearing mimickable debris took up a lot of my time in Prey, usually with satisfying results.

Combat also got more fun with the Combat Focus skill. Bullet time is always woth using.

Just because I’m a number-puzzles type: 80 points total, less 8 on uncounted games, leaves 72 points on 24 games – exactly 3 each. For Edith and DC to be the only ones to tie in first place, they must have scored at least 5 (many ties on 2,3,4) and at most 16 (every other game tied on 2). So whoever really loved Edith enough to give it a majority will have had to give it between 3 and 9 points. In any case, all of the games from 3rd place onwards will have had to have been really close, and mostly draws. Which seems fair, because it’s been a great year for games and it’ll be all difficult decisions to decide what’s best.

Merry xmas and happy new year everyone. Don’t drink anything I wouldn’t.

(For those confused at the above post and this one: RPS has added an explanation of their methodology to slide 26 . It took me a little while to figure this out.)

Thanks for the explanation! That certainly explains some of the oddball picks (I am going to go ahead and guess that Katherine put a decent number of points on The Nonary Games), and also explains how you kept Assassin’s Creed: Origins out of the calendar, which in any other year would have featured on account of being a good-enough game that was played by multiple staff, as opposed to a truly great game played by one person. So I’m gonna say this is a pretty great system :)

I’d also like to say that I’d have been sole victor of the competition had Edith Finch been selected instead of Dead Cells, but I’m happy to share the victory (and I get to continue to enjoy being the only person to ever correctly guess RPS’ GOTY (Rocket League in 2015) which just goes to show how unpredictable you folk are.

So under this system: what happens if, say, 40 games got 2 points each? Was your method for tiebreaking/kicking games off just in-group discussion? Or did people self-adjust by reassigning points to prevent such shenanigans?

“So under this system: what happens if, say, 40 games got 2 points each? Was your method for tiebreaking/kicking games off just in-group discussion? Or did people self-adjust by reassigning points to prevent such shenanigans?”

We’d have dealt with this should it have come up, but re-assigning points did lead to a certain amount of useful self-adjustment, And from previous years, yes, we’ve broken ties just by talking over it. It’s helpful that we’re not making an ordered list, aside from the one winner!

Hey RPS folk: For some reason the “Supporter” tag is showing under my name on the sidebar and I seem to have access to supporter articles.
I didn’t give you anything and don’t deserve this. Just a heads-up.

Yay, WotC! It was cool! But somewhere along the line, I got so sucked into the numbers that I stopped loving my soldiers. That was sad. We’ll give it another go and see if we can do better. The only other thing on this list that I’ve played was Numenera, which was very interesting and different. But I find I don’t remember much of it.

My best games of 2017 were Witcher 3 and its DLCs, plus MGSV and *its* DLCs. I quite enjoyed the latter (though, goodness, Quiet was the Most Gratuitous Person of 2017), but I was honestly blown away by Witcher 3. It’s the first (and only) CPDR game I’ve played, and it was so incredible. Ironically, unlike MGSV, I felt like the fanservice elements were totally avoidable. But I digress.

No AC Origins, really? It’s the game I’m playing now, been a bliss since the very beginning. It’s definitely up there with other excellent ones I’ve played like Prey, NiER Automata and Edith Finch. It can’t not be in your “25 best of 2017”!

No love for Warhammer2 Total War? My strategy GOTY for certain… I’d have thought it might at least warrant an early spot on the calendar, especially given the largely positive coverage you guys have given it across the year.

As usual, these lists mostly make me sad that I don’t have the time/energy to have played more than one of the games on this list this year (it was XCOM2:WotC, btw, and I haven’t even finished one campaign of it yet – the only other game I actually played for any significant amount of time this year was Heat Signature…).

Not my type of list. Games such as Tacoma, Getting Over It and Numenera are by no means bad, but they pale in comparison to the stellar achievements that are Rain World, Darkwood and Hollow Knight. Then there’s ports of a classic like Okami and the excellent Nioh, the adventuring goodness of Thimbleweed Park and Cuphead’s ample style.

This was such a strong year so a number of okay-but-not-great titles sneaking in is weird, though I agree that Rakuen is quite good. That game had a lot of heart.

Totally agree, including your specifics. Darkwood is fucking unforgettable, Rain World is a work of art, Hollow Knight is just all the fun. Like you say, the picks werent at all bad, but I, too, feel like there were worthier games out there. I’ve played Getting Over It, and I do think Darkwood could have taken its place…

Ohhh if I wanna get upset I dont need all that..! All I need is to go back and revisit the RPS review of Fallout New Vegas! That one damn near cost this whole site credibility in my eyes! They have John Walker and Brendan Caldwell to thank for my loyalty!

In defense of Quinns’ review – while Obsidian does the absolute best they can with New Vegas, making an interesting world, great characters, very difficult narrative decisions – they’re still doing it atop an incredibly ropey Bethesda engine and systems design that is flawed at best and broken at worst. Insofar as New Vegas has problems it really isn’t their fault (they couldn’t change engines, rebuild the combat engine from scratch, or any of that) and I throughly enjoyed the game, but if someone didn’t like it because it shared all the mechanical problems of Fallout 3, I really couldn’t blame them.

not only that but bethseda was actually in charge of hiring and supervising beta testers during the final quality assurance push for new vegas. So not only was obsidian hampered by the engine, but bethseda was responsible for making sure new vegas was as buggy or less buggy than fallout3, and bethseda dropped the ball on this issue. As a result of these bugs obsidian lost their bonus, which would’ve accounted for almost 100% of the profit they made on the deal. In my mind, this colored bethseda’s supervision of a rushed quality assurance phase before going gold.

I do not like having to click 25 times to read a short list. Sites that force you to do this are usually much more scummy than RPS. In the past the final page of these on RPS was a table of contents list. I love those summary pages. I read the summary, then I see some interesting games on it. Then I go back and read page’s 3 8 and 15, skipping the extra 20 clicks I don’t want to invest.

AC Origins is my GOTY so far (still haven’t finished, I’m in Alexandria, at level 12). Prey, NiER, Edith Finch, F1 2017 may all have been masterpieces, but AC Origins was the one that jaw dropped me the most.